Temkin Group, a customer experience research and consulting firm, this week named the winners of its 2012 Customer Experience Excellence (CE2) Awards, which honor organizations for their customer experience transformation efforts and results.

The five winners of the 2012 CE2 Award are EMC, the data storage products and services provider; Fidelity Investments; the Oklahoma City Thunder NBA franchise, Safelite AutoGlass, and Sovereign Assurance of New Zealand.

EMC won for its Total Customer Experience (TCE) program, which is designed to enable business growth through improvements based on a customer-focused, data-driven strategy. The program provides ways for customers, partners, and EMC field personnel to provide feedback on their experiences, and measures customer quality in every interaction..

Fidelity Investments' program delivers enterprise-wide results. The program is comprised of four integrated elements: voice of the customer and associate, end-to-end process improvement, culture and communications, and measurement and rewards.

"Create Repeat Guests Profitably" is the mission of the guest relations team of the Oklahoma City Thunder. The team uses various fan feedback platforms, including email, text message, telephone, written submissions, and social media, to gather feedback, and promotes them on its Web site and during in-game announcements.

On the company's path back from bankruptcy, Safelite AutoGlass CEO Tom Feeney set a goal in 2008 to double business in four years by putting Safelite's people first, focusing on talent development and employee engagement, and going above and beyond to delight every customer.

Sovereign Assurance of New Zealand's strategy is to create customer engagement and advocacy through effortless experiences, with a program of initiatives around placing customers front and center, stickier relationships, maximizing touch points, and focusing on value.

In addition to the winners, the following six organizations were also finalists for the award: Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, Bombardier Aerospace, cloud, networking and virtualization technologies provider Citrix, JetBlue, Microsoft, and Oracle.

Hyken said he was impressed with all the competitors. "Their efforts and results are amazing, and prove that they are both customer- and employee-centric," he said in a statement.

"All of this year's finalists deserve accolades for their success making customer experience a core pillar of their business strategy," Thompson added. "Collectively, they illustrate how customer-centric leadership is the key to driving change throughout the organization, in voice-of-customer programs, experience design, and employee engagement."